Other View: State's graduation rate fails too many

Californians already knew that too many students were failing to graduate from high school: The state Department of Education releases the graduation rate each year. The latest numbers, for the 2011 graduating class, actually are up slightly - 76 percent compared to 2010's 74 percent.

But that increase doesn't look like progress when California's graduation rate is compared to other states. Thanks to a new report from the U.S. Department of Education that provides the first-ever common matrix for state-by-state comparisons, we now know the answer: California isn't doing well at all.

In fact, California ranks in the bottom half of all 50 states, tying for 32nd place with Utah, Washington and West Virginia. We're just slightly ahead of Mississippi.

The core of California's problem is our failure to close the achievement gap. Our Asian and Pacific Islander students have graduation rates of 89 percent, and white students are at 85 percent - but Latinos are graduating at a rate of only 70 percent, and the African-American rate is 63 percent.

California needs to do better than this. We've fallen behind our peers when it comes to educating the next generation of workers and citizens. That doesn't just impoverish those individual children - it impoverishes the whole state.

Allocating more state funding to schools is part of the puzzle, but only part. California spends slightly more than $10,000 per student per year, which is below the national average but on par with some states, like North Dakota, that have managed to achieve high graduation rates.

If the schools are to get more money, it needs to be focused on the students who are struggling - overwhelmingly lower-income students who are Latino or African American. This is where California's signature Prop. 13 has really hurt us.

So it's interesting that one of the first bills that state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, has introduced after the Democratic majority won two-thirds of the seats in both houses of the state Legislature is an amendment to Prop. 13. Leno's plan would lower the approval threshold on local school parcel taxes to 55 percent of the vote, instead of the current 66 percent. The Legislature is going to have to think bigger when it comes to helping struggling students. A less-educated California is a poorer California.